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wiseleoon Ask HN: I was hit with a patent troll lawsuit, how do I deal with it?

I've tried to get onto a jury panel for IP cases. Defense attorneys do not want anyone with IP and computer skills anywhere near that panel. The easiest way to skip a jury is to claim forensic expertise. Judge William Alsup (Oracle vs. Google) is famous because he actually has sufficient CS understanding to tell when someone lies. https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...

wiseleoon Ask HN: What's some great fiction for founders and entrepreneurs?

I like Tom Clancy's writing.

wiseleoon Ask HN: What's some great fiction for founders and entrepreneurs?

S1 filings :)

wiseleoon New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

There should be a standard for replaceable boards for major appliances. Compressors in fridges and motors in washers ultimately do not change. The front interface changes but that's ultimately just programming the on/off cycle for that motor.

wiseleoon CA EDD is so hard to reach that the unemployed pay go-betweens to do it for them

The phone number for EDD is 1-800-300-5616,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,11 (some suggest 24, but that's technically an abuse that attempts to contact a different department for employers. 121 would be a more appropriate set of options, but that injects additional recordings and leads to same queue).

The system has an an unskippable 1:30 greeting, which causes enormous waste of time.

If you have to figure out how to program a phone to press buttons after a 1:30 timeout, the system is broken.

If you call on TTY, which is a functional text interface, they will eventually answer and then claim abuse and disconnect. That is likely an ADA violation.

Your odds of reaching a person are worse than winning a radio contest before they switched to text. My 8 hours of call logs prove it.

I am tempted to make a Twilio script. If call dropped, redial, else connect human. I bet you that's how these services operate.

wiseleoon Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws

Schematics used to be included in user manuals for all consumer electronics.

Anyone capable of recreating an electronic device from schematics can easily reverse engineer such device from the board. They are not secret. Reverse engineering them is a little time consuming, but it's not hard. Circuit board design follows established conventions. I can fix boards without schematics.

wiseleoon Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws

It seems like a tax like the Gas Guzzler tax on "unconventional" vehicles could be an answer and governments don't say no to taxes.

wiseleoon Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws

Ask for the stars and settle for the moon is a common tactic. We are subsidizing company profits at the expense of environment through forced obsolescence. Ewaste shouldn't exist as a concept for functioning products. Earth's resources are not infinite. Glue can be dissolved. Microscopes enable microsoldering. China has an entire industry devoted to tooling for such rework.

wiseleoon Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws

I refurbish medical devices in California. The customer can either talk to sales or talk to me. Medical devices are a computer-controlled apparatus, and the computer. I can fix the computer without affecting the device's calibration. Devices don't break often, but their controlling computers do.

The oldest devices I serviced run on Windows 3.1 and still work fine. There's a touchscreen mono CRT that runs on some custom build of Windows 3.1 in daily use at that office. I use Windows 98 daily.

wiseleoon Roku says it may lose YouTube TV app after Google made anti-competitive demands

"Hey Siri, navigate to ___ using google maps" is how I do it. :)

wiseleoon Court rules grocery store’s inaccessible website isn’t an ADA violation

I can authenticate with a fingerprint and tap a "reorder" button while sitting at a red light. Definitely not awful. :)

wiseleoon Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama

Leave US and owe US taxes on foreign income unless the citizenship is renounced. There are costs to renounce US citizenship as well. Therefore, it is not that simple.

wiseleoon Done Answering Questions Stack Overflow

Content needs to be clustered by technology. Python 2 answers are different from Python 3. One way would be to archive older definitively answered questions and allow new questions to be flagged for the newer release, such as Python 3. Wherever there were breaking changes, answers become invalid for the newer technology. Flagging every question by year would be the easy way. Any question prior to ES6 release would be legacy JavaScript, for example.

wiseleoon CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

A large portion of legacy systems integration can be solved by asking the question “which data must be updated in real-time and which can wait for batch processing?”

Screen scrape data from legacy terminal apps, export into SQL middleware, have the new app interact with the SQL middleware via modern APIs. All legacy data gets batch updated back into legacy systems, all new data gets stored and accessed in middleware. Eventually, the middleware becomes the primary data source and the entity can save on the electric bill.

wiseleoon Gig Workers Have Nowhere to Pee (2020)

To make things worse, gyms are shutdown. They were a reliable 24/7 location if the driver had membership.

There needs to be infrastructure for true public restrooms in urban areas.

Uber et al needs to make mandatory access to its drivers a condition of doing business with the food service.

wiseleoon Select a muscle and it provides the exercises to workout the selected muscle

That’s nice. I use a workout book that isolates and combines various exercises. Looking forward to using your site.

wiseleoon Canada's 350-year-old department store Hudson's Bay locked out by landlords

I went to Best Buy several times and was in and out in several minutes. It improved a lot.

wiseleoon Ask HN: Have you picked up any new skill from scratch in your 40s or later?

Machining. It started with YouTube. I picked up a lot of concepts and that set my brain to recognize these tools. Then I randomly bought a milling supply company basically for almost nothing while shopping for interesting deals.

Well, now I have multiple tons of milling tooling and so obviously I need a 3-ton milling machine. Looking at an older CNC mill.

So that’s one skill. Another is automotive repair. My skill level is high enough to do engine replacement. Just bought a car lift today to make everything easier. This does intersect with other skills - I use oscilloscope for automotive troubleshooting, which is not far from software engineering and electronics. This led me to almost opening a mobile A/C repair business. I acquired most of the equipment I needed and got certified for federal licenses. This got delayed because of the machine shop company that fell into my lap. That’s just a much bigger opportunity.

I can credit YouTube for introducing me to many interesting skills and hobbies.

Competitive dancing. I have been a good dancer since 16 years of age, but then I studied with world championship teams. At that point, the dance is a tightly choreographed athletic activity. I was going to start competing this year, but that will have to wait a little. There are various age categories, so I can compete on equal terms with other similar couples.

Relearning math. I am not terrible at it, but I am attempting to create a curriculum that does not focus on rote memorization.

wiseleoon The Right to Repair could help address a critical shortage in school computers

I can buy used Chromebooks that clearly came from schools for $69 at retail and substantially less in container load quantities. At the same time, schools say they can’t buy Chromebooks. There’s a disconnect here - these devices are supported by Google longer than the schools are keeping them.

Schools need to stop trashing perfectly functional devices as e-waste and should make them available to other schools and cities.

I use my HP G4 11” Chromebooks every day for software development. They are certainly good enough for school work.

I support right to repair, of course, but this article can cause harm to that cause. It mentions overriding activation locks. That’s bypassing security measures on functional products, which is not truly repair.

Should the manufacturer have a process to factory reset low value equipment? Of course. Still, I wouldn’t want to conflate that with right of repair

wiseleoon Congratulations for reaching a million, Gordon Linoff

People who ask questions are usually different from people who answer questions. I have significant presence on Quora where I wrote 8300+ answers and asked 98 questions in 10 years with 10057 followers. My monthly views are about 150000.

Quora has different incentives for asking questions and answering them. I am also connected to a community of people who mostly ask questions and don't write answers.

It is hard to ask a good question to which I can't find an answer. I ask questions for which there are no good existing answers and usually outside my realm of expertise. This is true for most other top contributors on Quora. Most of us ask very few questions.

wiseleoon Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200813/swedens-no-lockdown...

This from last week, cites studies. Short version: Sweden was wrong.

wiseleoon Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

A circuit workout maximizes efficiency. Machines isolate muscle groups. Similar results can be achieved with free weights, but that requires paying attention to form, which is difficult at exertion limits. It is difficult to break form on a machine. Hence, machines can enable you to overtrain but they are also excellent at preventing injuries.

If you regularly lift truly heavy weight, you need a squat rack and a rubber floor capable of sustaining equipment drops.

Going from a dedicated machine to another dedicated machine is faster than reconfiguring a universal machine like a Bowflex. Pace matters in a workout. Rests are regulated.

I own variable weight equipment. Someone sold me a set of Turbobells, which scale from 5 to 60 pounds per hand. It is a great system similar to Bowflex Selectech. My workouts require using 3 progressively heavier weights. It is a common body building technique.

So, for my arms I need 10, 12.5, and 15 pounds. Some exercises are 15, 17.5, and 20 pounds. My legs are stronger, so I use 35, 40, and 45 pounds. If I didn't have an adjustable set, this would be a lot of free weights and good luck finding fractional sizes in a store.

Gyms usually have good air flow, at least at the gyms where I am a member. Many have amenities like swimming pool, whirlpool, massage chairs and so on.

Dropping weights at a gym is annoyance. Doing so in an apartment above neighbors is evictable.

People whose goal is to lose weight do not need a gym.

Completing my workout with a set of dedicated weights at 2am when I have the gym to myself is at least 20 minutes faster than with my adjustable weights. So, using a gym also saves time.

Costs to replicate a gym: 1. 8x4 1" gym mat - about $150, weighs over 100lb - just looked into this last week. 6x3' horse stall mats are decent also. 2. Free weights - a few hundred all-in 3. 8' Mirror - not cheap and yes they are necessary 4. Adjustable bench - over $100 5. Gym-like variable height adjustable treadmills are not cheap

All of this takes space to store. If you do not have excess space, that adds to setup and teardown time.

wiseleoon Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

Working out in a mask is very tough. It is a difficulty enhancement. I dance in a mask at a pace similar to jogging and that is hard enough. I wouldn't want to try to do a full workout that way. That would be the first order to get ignored.

Is there a way to work out safely? Complete air replacement and surface disinfection. That can realistically only be done outdoors.

As a club kid who refuses to grow up, I bring my professional club lights and a mobile DJ speaker to the park to dance with a friend. She has a much harder time coping with isolation and it helps her. It is a system for events of 50-100 people, so it is loud enough to mimic the experience. I would actually be OK with us both wearing Bluetooth headphones like my JBL BT Reflect Mini, which are robust enough to wear while dancing and doing crazy head moves, but a club speaker sounds different because of the reverb from the surrounding environment.

We still wear masks despite not touching and being completely outdoors. We do not need to according to laws of physics, but not doing so would contribute to the attitude that masks are optional. They are not optional. As much as I trust my friend and she trusts me, there is no way to know with certainty we can not infect each other after a day of interaction with other people.

One way to setup a safe workout would be to use the gym's parking lot and set it up with gym flooring and 10x10' canopies. Portable patio heaters would keep the person warm when warm weather ends. They are expensive, but one way to solve that would be to setup a solar array and use electric heaters.

Another friend who is a Zumba instructor is hosting classes in a park's parking lot. That works for her and her students and it is safe.

wiseleoon Oracle is in talks to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations, sources say

Adobe owns Marketo, among others, so yeah it would make sense. :)

wiseleoon Oracle is in talks to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations, sources say

WTF is in it for Oracle of all companies?

wiseleoon The machines USPS is removing can sort more than 36,000 pieces of mail per hour

Christmas cards volume would dwarf election volume easily. You are looking at a many to many relationship vs a finite number of ballots.

wiseleoon Microsoft to Stop Supporting Office 2016 for Mac in October

4 years... only 4 years. Their software is capable of being used for decades. This is just sad.

wiseleoon Show HN: The Tree Table is a portable table that mounts on a tree's trunk.

I use a couple of music stands to set optimal angle and height for my laptop and keyboard, but this is a good idea. Should be able to make it :)

The fabric shade would be trickier to make. I use a small pop up tent though. It unfolds by throwing into air and keeps mosquitoes out. :)

wiseleoon Ask HN: If you had to choose a place to start a startup today where would it be?

No income tax on business or personal income. You can become the state’s resident after spending just one night in a hotel and opening a bank account. That’s partially why it’s highly favored by RVers who choose to longer have a permanent home.

There’s opportunity to modify the state’s politics. ;)

I am likely going to set my HQ in that state.

wiseleoon Companies made millions building unemployment websites that didn’t work

Model the system as objects without writing code. Get the methods and properties accepted without writing code. Write a suite of tests for the model. Implement code.

That’s how complex systems don’t have to feel like monoliths.